The Guardian's Frei For All

In response to HonestReporting's recent communique, The Guardian amendedSlavoj Zizek's commentary making some ugly comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. A note at the bottom of the page now states:

This article was amended on 20 August 2009. The online version originally referred to "Palestinian-frei", while the print version had been edited to say "Palestinian-free". This editing change should have been applied to the online version. This has now been done.

It's welcome change, but just a minor one. As Harry's Place aptly points out, the paragraph that the term "Palestinian-frei" appeared in is still slanderous in its own right. Here's what Zizek originally wrote:

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world”. However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

To which Harry's Place points out:

So, according to Zizek, the Palestinians’ “problematic cliche” of Gaza being “the greatest concentration camp in the world” is “dangerously close to the truth”. Israel, one presumes, is becoming the new Nazi Germany, and Palestinians are becoming the new Jews. Furthermore, this moral and historical perversion of Holocaust imagery is nothing more than a “problematic cliche” that is, anyway, now coming to fruition . . . .

There is more than one “problematic cliche” in Zizek’s article, and in its publication by the Guardian and CiF. The most egregious part of one of those has been belatedly taken care of, but how many more “problematic cliches” will the Guardian stable keep chucking at us?

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